Now Reading
Jan 21, 2019 23:29:16 GMT -5
Post by Tails82 on Jan 21, 2019 23:29:16 GMT -5
Martin Luther King Jr. Strength to Love.
(My experiment this year is to quote from him on board 261, as if it were one of my rants. So far they don't like it!)
(My experiment this year is to quote from him on board 261, as if it were one of my rants. So far they don't like it!)
I.
This undue gullibility is also seen in the tendency of many readers to accept the printed word of the press as final truth. Few people realize that even our authentic channels of information...do not give us objective and unbiased truth...Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and false facts. One of the great needs of mankind is to be lifted above the morass of false propaganda.
This has also led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true...Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
We do not need to look far to detect the dangers of softmindedness. Dictators, capitalizing on softmindedness, have led men to acts of barbarity and terror that are unthinkable in civilized society. Adolf Hitler realized that softmindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said, 'I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.' In Mein Kampf he asserted:
'By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell, heaven...The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.'
The toughminded person always examines the facts before he reaches conclusions; in short, he postjudges. The tenderminded person reaches a conclusion before he has examined the first act; in short, he prejudices and is prejudiced.
There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
II.
'Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind' -Romans 12:2
'Do not conform' is difficult advice in a generation when crowd pressures have unconsciously conditioned our minds and feet to move to the rhythmic drumbeat of the status quo. Many voices and forces urge us to choose the path of least resistance, and bid us never to fight for an unpopular cause...Even certain of our intellectual disciplines persuade us of the need to conform. Some psychologists say that mental and emotional adjustment is the reward of thinking and acting like other people.
In spite of this prevailing tendency to conform, we as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists...we are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.
As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the very heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed.
When we would yield to the temptation of a world rife with sexual promiscuity and gone wild with a philosophy of self-expression, Jesus tells us that 'whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.'
When we refuse to suffer for righteousness and choose to follow the path of comfort rather than conviction, we hear Jesus say, 'Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'
When in our spiritual pride we boast of having reached the peak of moral excellence, Jesus warns, 'The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.'
Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Along with this has grown an inordinate worship of bigness...where men find security in that which is large and extensive - big cities, big buildings, big corporations.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.' To the conformist and the shapers of the conformist mentality, this must surely sound like a most dangerous and radical doctrine. Have we permitted the lamp of independent thought and individualism to become so dim that were Jefferson to write and live by these words today we would find cause to harass and investigate him? If Americans permit thought-control, business-control and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism.
We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitative giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ...If the church of Jesus Christ is to regain once more its power, message, and authentic ring, it must conform only to the demands of the gospel.
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!
III.
We so often ask, 'What will happen to my job, my prestige, or my status if I take a stand on this issue? Will my home be bombed, will my life be threatened, or will I be jailed?' The good man always reverses the question...'What will happen to these millions of people who have been wounded by the forces of injustice, if I do not go to them?'
The Samaritan also possessed excessive altruism. With his own hands he bound the wounds of the man and then sent him on his own beast. It would have been easier to pay an ambulance to take the unfortunate man to the hospital, rather than risk having his neatly trimmed suit stained with blood. True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to sympathize. Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul...Instead of seeking to do something with the African and Asian peoples, we have too often sought only to do something for them. An expression of pity, devoid of genuine sympathy, leads to a new form of paternalism which no self-respecting person can accept.
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick has made an impressive distinction between enforceable and unenforceable obligations. The former are regulated by the codes of society and the vigorous implementation of law-enforcement agencies..But unenforceable obligations are beyond the reach of the laws of society. They concern inner attitudes, genuine person-to-person relations, and expressions of compassion which law books cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify. Such obligations are met by one's commitment to an inner law, written on the heart. No code of conduct ever persuaded a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife...A good father is obedient to the unenforceable.
We must admit that the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable...Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right.
No longer can we afford the luxury of passing by on the other side. Such folly was once called moral failure; today it will lead to universal suicide. We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together.
V.
Lincoln tried love and left for all history a magnificent drama of reconciliation. When he was campaigning for the presidency, one of his arch-enemies was a man named Stanton. For some reason Stanton hated Lincoln. He used every ounce of his energy to degrade him in the eyes of the public. So deep rooted was Stanton’s hate for Lincoln that he uttered words about his physical appearance, and sought to embarrass him at every point with bitterest diatribes. But in spite of this Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Then came the period when he had to select his cabinet which would consist of the persons who would be his most intimate associates in implementing his program. He started choosing men here and there for the various secretaryships. The day finally came for Lincoln to select a man to fill the all-important post of Secretary of War. Can you imagine who Lincoln chose to fill this post? None other than the man named Stanton. There was an immediate uproar in the inner circle where the news began to spread. Adviser after adviser was heard saying, “Mr. President, you are making a mistake. Do you know this man, Stanton? Are you familiar with all of the ugly things he said about you? He is your enemy. He will seek to sabotage your program. Have you thought this through, Mr. President?” Mr. Lincoln’s answer was terse and to the point: “Yes. I know Mr. Stanton. I am aware of all the terrible things he has said about me. But after looking over the nation, I find he is the best man for the job”. So, Stanton became Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War and rendered an invaluable service to his nation and his President. Not many years later Lincoln was assassinated. Many laudable things were said about him. Even today millions of people still adore him as the greatest of Americans. But of all the great statements made about Abraham Lincoln, the words of Stanton remain among the greatest. Standing near the dead body of the man he once hated, Stanton referred to him as one of the greatest men that had ever lived and said, “He now belongs to the ages”. If Lincoln had hated Stanton both the men would have gone to their graves as bitter enemies. But through the power of love Lincoln transformed an enemy into a friend. It was the same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feeling was the bitterest. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln answered, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” This is the power of redemptive love.
My friends, we have followed the so-called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos...For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way. This does not mean we must abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.
To our most bitter opponents we say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force...Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.
Napoleon Bonaparte, the great military genius, looking back over his years of conquest, is reported to have said: 'Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I have built great empires. But upon what did they depend? They depended on force. But centuries ago Jesus started an empire that was built on love,and even to this day millions will die for him.' Who can doubt the veracity of these words. The great military leaders of the past have gone, and their empires have crumbles and burned to ashes. But the empire of Jesus, built solidly and majestically on the foundation of love, is still growing.
Jesus is eternally right. History is replete with the bleached bones of nations that refused to listen to him. May we in the twentieth century hear and follow his words - before it is too late.
VI.
How naturally we turn to science in a day when the problems of the world are so ghastly and ominous. But alas! Science cannot rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.
The midnight in man's external collective life is paralleled by midnight in his internal individual life. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Deep clouds of anxiety and depression are suspended in our mental skies. More people are emotionally disturbed today than at any other time of human history...Some have been tempted to revise Jesus' command to read, 'Go ye into all the world, keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality.'
It is also midnight within the moral order. At midnight colors lose their distinctiveness and become a sullen shade of gray. Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong is a matter of what the majority is doing. Right and wrong are relative to the likes and dislikes and the customs of a particular community. We have unconsciously applied Einstein's theory of relativity, which properly described the physical universe, to the moral and ethical realm.
Midnight is the hour when men desperately seek to obey the eleventh commandment: 'Thou shalt not get caught.' According to the ethic of midnight, the cardinal sin is to be caught and the cardinal virtue is to get by. It is all right to lie, but one must lie with real finesse. It is all right to steal, if one is so dignified that, if caught, the charge becomes embezzlement, not robbery. It is permissible even to hate, if one dresses his hating in the garments of love and hating appears to be loving. The Darwinian concept the of survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. This mentality has brought a tragic breakdown of moral standards, and the midnight of moral degeneration deepens.
As in the parable, so in our world today, the deep darkness of midnight is interrupted by the sound of a knock. On the door of the church millions of people knock. In this country the roll of church members is larger than ever before...Visitors to Soviet Russia, whose official policy is atheistic, report that the churches in that nation are not only crowded, but that attendance continues to grow. Harrison Salisbury, in an article in the New York Times, states that Communist officials are disturbed that so many young people express a growing interest in the church and religion. After forty years of the most vigorous efforts to suppress religion, the hierarchy of the Communist party now faces the inescapable fact that millions of people are knocking on the door of the church.
There is also a deep longing for the bread of hope. In the early years of the century many people did not hunger for this bread. The days of the first telephones, automobiles, and airplanes gave them a radiant optimism. They worshiped on the shrine of inevitable progress...But then a series of tragic developments, revealing the selfishness and corruption of man, illustrated with frightening clarity the truth of Lord Acton's dictum, 'Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' This awful discovery led to one of the most colossal breakdowns of optimism in history. For so many people, young and old, the light of hope went out, and they roamed wearily in the dark chambers of pessimism. Many concluded that life has no meaning...But even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope.
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.
Two types of Negro churches have failed to provide bread. One burns with emotionalism, the other freezes with classism. The former, reducing worship to entertainment, places more emphasis on volume than on content and confuses spirituality with muscularity. The danger in such a church is that the members may have more religion in their hands and feet than in their hearts and souls.
VII.
Jesus never made a sweeping indictment against wealth. Rather, he condemned the misuse of wealth. Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil...Nothing in wealth is inherently vicious, and nothing in poverty is inherently virtuous.
The rich man was a fool because he permitted the ends for which he lived to become confused with the means by which he lived. The economic structure of his life absorbed his destiny...His life was submerged in the rolling waters of livelihood.
The richer this man became materially the poorer he became intellectually and spiritually. He may have been married, but he probably could not love his wife. It is possible that he gave her countless material gifts, but he could not give her that which she needed most, love and affection.
His soliloquy contains approximately sixty words, yet 'I' and 'my' occur twelve times. He had said 'I' and 'my' so often that he had lost the capacity to say 'we' and 'our.' A victim of the cancerous disease of egotism, he failed to realize that wealth always comes as a result of the commonwealth. He talked as though he could plow the fields and build the barns alone. He failed to realize that he was an heir of the vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead had contributed.
Jesus called the rich man a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on God. He talked as though he unfolded the seasons and provided the fertility of the soil, controlled the rising and the setting of the sun, and regulated the natural processes that produce the rain and the dew. He had an unconscious feeling that he was the Creator, not a creature.
This man-centered foolishness has had a long and ofttimes disastrous reign in the history of mankind. Sometimes it is theoretically expressed in the doctrine of materialism, which contends...that man is a transient accident of protons and electrons traveling blind, and thought is a temporary product of gray matter, and that the events of history are an interaction of matter and motion operating by the principle of necessity. Having no place for God or for external ideas, materialism is opposed to both theism and idealism.
This materialistic philosophy leads inevitably into a dead-end street in an intellectually senseless world. To believe that human personality is the result of the fortuitous interplay of atoms and electrons is as absurd as to believe that a monkey by hitting typewriter keys at random will eventually produce a Shakespearean play. Sheer magic! It is much more sensible to say with Sir James Jeans, the physicist, that 'the universe seems to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine,' or with Arthur Balfour, the philosopher, that 'we now know too much about matter to be materialists.' Materialism is a weak flame that is blown out by the breath of mature thinking.
Another attempt to make God irrelevant is found in nontheistic humanism, a philosophy that deifies man by affirming that humanity is God. Man is the measure of all things. Many modern men who have embraced this philosophy contend, as did Rousseau, that human nature is essentially good. Evil is to be found only in institutions, and if poverty and ignorance were to be removed everything would be all right. The twentieth century opened with such a glowing optimism. Men believed that civilization was evolving toward an earthly paradise. Herbert Spencer skillfully molded the Darwinian theory of evolution into the steady idea of automatic progress. Men became convinced that there is a sociological law of progress which is as valid as the physical law of gravitation.
Then came the explosion of this myth. It climaxed in the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and in the fierce fury of fifty-megaton bombs. Now we have come to see that science can give us only physical power, which, if not controlled by spiritual power, will lead inevitably to cosmic doom. The words of Alfred the Great are still true: 'Power is never good unless he be good that has it.' We need something more spiritually sustaining and morally controlling than science...apart from Gods' spirit, science is a deadly weapon that will lead only to deeper chaos.
Why fool ourselves about automatic progress and the ability of man to save himself? We must lift up our minds and eyes unto the hills from whence cometh our true help. Then, and only then, will the advances of modern science be a blessing rather than a curse.
The means by which we live has outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world of externals - airplanes, electric lights, automobiles, and color television - and lose the internal - his own soul?
VIII.
Is anything more obvious than the presence of evil in the universe? Its nagging, prehensile tentacles project into every level of human existence. We may debate the origin of evil, but only a victim of superficial optimism would debate its reality. Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.
But there is a checkpoint in the universe: evil cannot permanently organize itself.
We must be careful at this point not to engage in a superficial optimism or to conclude that the death of a particular evil means that all evil lies dead upon the seashore. All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. The Kingdom of God as a universal reality is not yet. Because sin exists on every level of man's existence, the death of one tyranny is followed by the emergence of another tyranny.
But just as we must avoid a superficial optimism, we must also avoid a crippling pessimism. Even though all progress is precarious, within limits real social progress may be made...Above all, we must be reminded anew that God is at work in his universe. He is not outside the world looking on with a sort of cold indifference. Here on all the roads of life, he is striving in our striving. Like an ever-loving Father, he is working through history for the salvation of his children. As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us. Evil dies on the seashore, not merely because of man's endless struggle against it, but because of God's power to defeat it.
I do not pretend to understand all of the ways of God or his particular timetable for grappling with evil. Perhaps if God dealt with evil in the overbearing way that we wish, he would defeat his ultimate purpose. We are responsible human beings, not blind automatons; persons, not puppets. By endowing us with freedom, God relinquished a measure of his own sovereignty and imposed certain limitations upon himself. If his children are free, they must do his will by voluntary choice. Therefore, God cannot at the same time impose his will upon his children and also maintain his purpose for man. If through sheer omnipotence God were to defeat his purpose, he would express weakness rather than power. Power is the ability to fulfill purpose; action which defeats purpose is weakness.
This faith will sustain us in our struggle to escape from the bondage of every evil Egypt. This faith will be a lamp unto our weary feet and a light unto our meandering path. Without such faith, man's highest dreams will pass silently to the dust.
IX.
Any complete life has the three dimensions suggested in our text - length, breadth, and height. The length of life is the inward drive to achieve one's personal ends and ambitions, an inward concern for one's own welfare and achievements. The breadth of life is the outward concern for the welfare of others. The height of life is the upward reach for God...Without the due development of each part of the triangle, no life can be complete.
We are challenged on every hand to work untiringly to achieve excellence in our lifework. Not all men are called to specialized or professional jobs; even fewer rise to the heights of genius in the arts and sciences; many are called to be laborers in factories, fields, and streets. But no work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.' This is what Douglas Mallock meant when he wrote:
If you can't be a pine on the top of the hill
Be a scrub in the valley - but be
The best little scrub by the side of the rill,
Be a bush, if you can't be a tree.
If you can't be a highway, just be a trail
If you can't be the sun, be a star;
It isn't by size, that you win or fail-
Be the best of whatever you are.
Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it. This clear outward drive toward self-fulfillment is the length of a man's life.
One will not be asked how many academic degrees he obtained or how much money he acquired, but how much he did for others.
...
I suspect, however, that a majority of people fit into still another category. They do not deny the existence of God with their lips, but they are continually denying his existence with their lives. They live as though there is no God. This erasing of God from the agenda of life may well have been an unconscious process. Most men do not say, 'Good-by, God, I am going to leave you now.' But they become so involved in the things of this world that they are unconsciously carried away by the rushing tide of materialism and are left treading in the confused waters of secularism. Modern man, living in what Professor Sorokin has called a 'sensate culture,' believes only those things which can be known by the five senses.
But this attempt to substitute a man-centered universe for a God-centered universe leads only to deeper frustration. Reinhold Niebuhr has said, 'Since 1914 one tragic event has followed another as if history were designed to refute the vain delusions of modern man.' We sail upon the seas of modern history like a ship without a compass.
I would urge you to give priority to the search for God. Allow his spirit to permeate your being. To meet the difficulties and challenges of your life you will need him...Without God, all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights. Without him, life is a meaningless drama in which the decisive scenes are missing. But with him, we are able to rise from tension-packed valleys to the sublime heights of inner peace, and find radiant stars of hope against the nocturnal bosom of life's most depressing nights. St. Augustine was right: 'Thou hast created us for thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted till it find repose in thee.'
I suspect that all too many of us are still dabbling with plans that are big in quantity, but small in quality, plans that move on the horizontal plane of time rather than on the vertical plane of eternity. I, too, would urge you to make your plans so large and broad that they cannot be bound by the chains of time and the manacles of space. Give your life - all you have and are - to the God of the universe whose purpose changeth not.
Where do we find this God? In a test tube? No. Where else except in Jesus Christ, the Lord of our lives? By knowing him we know God...If we are to know what God is like and understand his purposes for mankind, we must turn to Christ. By committing ourselves absolutely to Christ and his way, we will participate in that marvelous act of faith that will bring us to the true knowledge of God.
X.
One possible reaction is to distill all our frustrations into a core of bitterness and resentment. The person who pursues this path is likely to develop a callous attitude, a cold heart, and a bitter hatred toward God, toward those with whom he lives, and toward himself. Because he cannot corner God or life, he releases his pent-up vindictiveness in hostility toward other people. He may be extremely cruel to his mate and inhuman to his children. In short, meanness becomes his dominating characteristic. He loves no one and requires love from no one. He trusts no one and does not expect others to trust him. He finds fault in everything and everybody, and he continually complains.
We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but...Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities.
Our capacity to deal creatively with shattered dreams is ultimately determined by our faith in God. Genuine faith imbues us with the conviction that beyond time is a divine Spirit and beyond life is Life. However dismal and catastrophic may be the present circumstance, we know we are not alone, for God dwells with us in life's most confining and oppressive cells.
XI.
What Is Man?
The whole political, social, and economic structure of a society is largely determined by its answer to this vital question. Indeed, the conflict we witness between totalitarianism and democracy is fundamentally centered in this: Is man a person or a pawn? Is he a cog in the wheel of the state or a free, creative being capable of accepting responsibility?
Those who think of man purely in materialistic terms argue that man is simply an animal, a tiny object in the vast, ever-changing organism called nature, which is wholly unconscious and impersonal. His whole life may be explained in terms of matter in motion. Such a system of thought affirms that the conduct of man is physically determined and that the mind is merely an effect of the brain.
Those who posit the materialistic conception of man are often driven to the dark chambers of pessimism. They often find themselves agreeing with a recent writer that 'man is a cosmic accident, a disease on this planet not soon to be cured,' or with Jonathan Swift, who wrote, 'Man is the most pernicious little race of ominous vermin that nature ever suffered to walk across the face of the earth.'
Some thinkers never get beyond the point of seeing man as an animal. The Marxists, for instance, following a theory of dialectical materialism, contend that man is merely a producing animal who supplies his own needs and whose life is determined largely by economic forces. Others contend that the whole life of man is nothing but a materialistic process with a materialistic meaning.
Can man be explained in such shallow terms? Can we explain the literary genius of Shakespeare, the musical genius of Beethoven, and the artistic genius of Michelangelo in materialistic terms? Can we explain the spiritual genius of Jesus of Nazareth in materialistic terms? Can we explain the mystery and the magic of the human soul in materialistic terms? Oh, no! There is something within man which cannot be explained in chemical and biological terms, for man is more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons.
This brings us to a second point that must be included in any Christian doctrine of man. Man is a being of spirit. He moves us 'the stairs of his concepts' into a wonder world of thought. Conscience speaks to him, and he is reminded of things divine.
This spiritual quality gives him the unique capacity to live on two levels. He is in nature, yet above nature; he is in space and time, yet above them. He can do creative things that lower animals could never do. Man can think a poem and write it; he can think a symphony and compose it; he can think of a great civilization and produce it. Because of this capacity, he is not bound completely by space and time...By his ability to reason, his power of memory, and his gift of imagination, man transcends time and space. As marvelous as are the stars is the mind of man that studies them.
This is what the Bible means when it affirms that man is made in the image of God...An abiding expression of man's higher spiritual nature is his freedom. Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free too deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.
We hate to be told that man is a sinner. Nothing so insults modern man's pride. We have tried desperately to find other words - error of nature, absence of good, false concept of mind - to explain the sin of man. Turning to depth psychology, we attempt to dismiss sin as the result of inner conflicts, inhibitions, or a battle between the 'id' and the 'super-ego.' These concepts only serve to remind us that engulfing human nature is a tragic, threefold estrangement by which man is separated from himself, his neighbors, and his God. There is a corruption in man's will.
Man's sinfulness sinks to such devastating depths in his collective life that Reinhold Niebuhr could write a book titled Moral Man and Immoral Society. Man collectivized in the group, the tribe, the race, and the nation often sinks to levels of barbarity unthinkable even among lower animals.
Man is a sinner in need of God's forgiving grace. This is not deadening pessimism; it is Christian realism.
Despite man's tendency to live on low and degrading planes, something reminds him that he is not made for that. As he trails in the dust, something reminds him that he is made for the stars. As he makes folly his bedfellow, a nagging inner voice tells him that he is born for eternity. God's unbroken hold on us is something that will never permit us to feel right when we do wrong or to feel natural when we do the unnatural.
Jesus told of a young man who left home and wandered into a far country, where in adventure after adventure and sensation after sensation, he sought life. But he never found it; he found only frustration and bewilderment. The farther he moved from his father's house, the closer he came to the house of despair. The more he did what he liked, the less he liked what he did. Instead of leading him to a land flowing with the milk of happiness, the prodigal's journey led him to a pig's trough. This parable is an eternal reminder of the fact that man is made for the Father's house and that every excursion into the far country brings only frustration and homesickness.
Thank God the parable tells us more. The prodigal son was not himself when he left his father's house or when he dreamed that pleasure was the end of life. Only when he made up his mind to go home and be a son again did he really come to himself. There he found a loving father waiting with outstretched arms and a heart filled with unutterable joy. When the soul returns to its true home, there is always joy.
XII.
How Should A Christian View Communism?
Let me state clearly the basic premise of this sermon: Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible. A true Christian cannot be a true Communist, for the two philosophies are antithetical and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot reconcile them.
First, Communism is based on a materialistic and humanistic view of life and history. According to Communist theory, matter, not mind or spirit, speaks the last word in the universe. Such a philosophy is avowedly secularistic and atheistic. Under it, God is merely a figment of the imagination, religion is the product of fear and ignorance, and the church is an invention of the rulers to control the masses. Moreover, Communism, like humanism, thrives on the grand illusion that man, unaided by any divine power, can save himself and usher in a new society-
I fight alone, and win or sink,
I need no one to make me free;
I want no Jesus Christ to think,
That He would ever die for me.
Cold atheism wrapped in the garments of materialism, Communism provides no place for God or Christ.
At the center of the Christian faith is the affirmation that there is a God in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality. A Being of infinite love and boundless power, God is the creator, sustainer, and conserver of values. In opposition to Communism's atheistic materialism, Christianity posits a theistic idealism. Reality cannot be explained by matter in motion or the push and pull of economic forces. Christianity affirms that at the heart of reality is a Heart, a loving Father who works through history for the salvation of his children. Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior.
Second, Communism is based on ethical relativism and accepts no stable moral absolutes. Right and wrong are relative to the most expedient methods for dealing with class war. Communism exploits the dreadful philosophy that the end justifies the means. It enunciates movingly the theory of a classless society, but alas! its methods for achieving this noble end are all too often ignoble. Lying, violence, murder, and torture are considered to be justifiable means to achieve the millennial end. Is this an unfair indictment? Listen to the words of Lenin, the real tactician of Communist theory: "We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth." Modem history has known many tortuous nights and horror-filled days because his followers have taken this statement seriously.
In contrast to the ethical relativism of Communism, Christianity sets forth a system of absolute moral values and affirms that God has placed within the very structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable. The law of love as an imperative is the norm for all of man's actions. Furthermore, Christianity at its best refuses to live by a philosophy of ends justifying means. Destructive means cannot bring constructive ends, because the means represent the-ideal-in-the-making and the-end-in-progress. Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are preexistent in the means.
Third, Communism attributes ultimate value to the state. Man is made for the state and not the state for man. One may object, saying that in Communist theory the state is an "interim reality," which will "wither away" when the classless society emerges. True--in theory; but it is also true that, while it lasts, the state is the end. Man is a means to that end. Man has no inalienable rights. His only rights are derived from, and conferred by, the state. Under such a system, the fountain of freedom runs dry. Restricted are man's liberties of press and assembly, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen and to read. Art, religion, education, music, and science come under the gripping yoke of government control. Man must be a dutiful servant to the omnipotent state.
All of this is contrary, not only to the Christian doctrine of God, but also to the Christian estimate of man. Christianity insists that man is an end because he is a child of God, made in God's image. Man is more than a producing animal guided by economic forces; he is a being of spirit, crowned with glory and honor, endowed with the gift of freedom. The ultimate weakness of Communism is that it robs man of that quality which makes him man. Man, says Paul Tillich, is man because he is free. This freedom is expressed through man's capacity to deliberate, decide, and respond. Under Communism, the individual soul is shackled by the chains of conformity; his spirit is bound by the manacles of party allegiance. He is stripped of both conscience and reason. The trouble with Communism is that it has neither a theology nor a Christology; therefore it emerges with a mixed-up anthropology. Confused about God, it is also confused about man. In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism's methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.
Clearly, then, all of this is out of harmony with the Christian view of things. We must not fool ourselves. These systems of thought are too contradictory to be reconciled; they represent diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world and of transforming it. We should as Christians pray for the Communist constantly, but never can we, as true Christians, tolerate the philosophy of Communism.
The Communist Manifesto was written by men aflame with a passion for social justice.
Communism in theory emphasizes a classless society. Although the world knows from sad experience that Communism has created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice...
No doctrinaire Communist ever expressed a passion for the poor and oppressed such as we find in the Manifesto of Jesus which affirms: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."
Christians are also bound to recognize the ideal of a world unity in which all barriers of caste and color are abolished. Christianity repudiates racism. The broad universalism standing at the center of the gospel makes both the theory and practice of racial injustice morally unjustifiable. Racial prejudice is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ, for in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, Negro nor white.
We need to pledge ourselves anew to the cause of Christ. We must recapture the spirit of the early church. Wherever the early Christians went, they made a triumphant witness for Christ. Whether on the village streets or in the city jails, they daringly proclaimed the good news of the gospel. Their reward for this audacious witness was often the excruciating agony of a lion's den or the poignant pain of a chopping block, but they continued in the faith that they had discovered a cause so great and had been transformed by a Savior so divine that even death was not too great a sacrifice. When they entered a town, the power structure became disturbed. Their new gospel brought the refreshing warmth of spring to men whose lives had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. They urged men to revolt against old systems of injustice and old structures of immorality. When the rulers objected, these strange people, intoxicated with the wine of God's grace, continued to proclaim the gospel until even men and women in Caesar's household were convinced, until jailers dropped their keys, and until kings trembled on their thrones. T. R. Glover has written that the early Christians "out-thought, out-lived, and out-died" everyone else.
Where is that kind of fervor today? Where is that kind of daring, revolutionary commitment to Christ today?
Christ must once more be enthroned in our lives. This is our best defense against Communism.
We must not engage in a negative anti-Communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against Communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice and righteousness...Like the early Christians, we must move into a sometimes hostile world armed with the revolutionary gospel of Jesus Christ. With this powerful gospel we shall boldly challenge the status quos and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed."
Our hard challenge and our sublime opportunity is to bear witness to the spirit of Christ in fashioning a truly Christian world. If we accept the challenge with devotion and valor, the bell of history will toll for Communism. and we shall make the world safe for democracy and secure for the people of Christ.
XIII.
Let us notice also that God is able to subdue all the powers of evil. In affirming that God is able to conquer evil we admit the reality of evil. Christianity has never dismissed evil as illusory, or an error of the mortal mind. It reckons with evil as a force that has objective reality. But Christianity contends that evil contains the seed of its own destruction. History is the story of evil forces that advance with seemingly irresistible power only to be crushed by the battling rams of the forces of justice. There is a law in the moral world - which reminds us that life will work only in a certain way. The Hitlers and the Mussolinis have their day, and for a period they may wield great power...but soon they are cut down like the grass and whither as the green herb.
God walks with us. He has placed within the very structure of this universe certain absolute moral laws. We can neither defy nor break them. If we disobey them, they will break us.
At times we may feel that we do not need God, but on the day when the storms of disappointment rage, the winds of disaster blow, and the tidal waves of grief beat against our lives, if we do not have a deep and patient faith our emotional lives will be ripped to shreds. There is so much frustration in the world because we have relied on gods rather than God. We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate. We have worshiped the god of pleasure only to discover that thrills play out and sensations are short-lived.
The transitory gods are not able to save us or bring happiness to the human heart. Only God is able.
XIV.
Everywhere men are confronted by fears that often appear in strange disguises or a variety of wardrobes. Haunted by the possibility of bad health, we detect in every meaningless symptom an evidence of disease...A fear of what life may bring encourages some persons to wander aimlessly along the frittering road of excessive drink and sexual promiscuity. Almost without being aware of the change, many people have permitted fear to transform the sunrise of love and peace into a sunset of inner depression.
But I do not mean to suggest that we should seek to eliminate fear altogether from human life. Were this humanly possible, it would be practically undesirable. Fear is the elemental alarm system of the human organism which warns us of approaching dangers and without which man could not have survived in either the primitive or modern worlds. Fear, moreover, is a powerfully creative force. Every great invention and intellectual advance represents a desire to escape from some dreaded circumstance or condition. The fear of darkness led to the discovery of the secret of electricity. The fear of pain left to the marvelous advances of human science. The fear of ignorance was one reason that man built great institutions in learning...Angelo Patri has rightly said, 'Education consists in being afraid at the right time.' If man were to lose his capacity to fear, he would be deprived of his capacity to grow, invent, and create. So in a sense fear is normal, necessary, and creative.
But this is only a part of the story. Normal fear protects us; abnormal fear paralyzes us. Normal fear motivates us to improve our individual and collective welfare; abnormal fear constantly poisons and distorts our inner lives. Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.
Courage, the determination not to be overwhelmed by any object, however frightful, enables us to stand up to any fear...Evil and pain in this conundrum of life are close to each of us, and we do both ourselves and our neighbors a great disservice when we attempt to prove that there is nothing in this world of which we should be frightened.
Courage and cowardice are antithetical. Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations; cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance. Courage breeds creative self-affirmation; cowardice produces self-abnegation. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.
The Negro must convince the white man that he seeks justice for both himself and the white man. A mass movement exercising love and nonviolence and demonstrating power under discipline should convince the white community that were such a movement to attain strength its power would be used creatively and not vengefully.
Abnormal fears and phobias that are expressed in neurotic anxiety may be cured by psychiatry; but the fear of death, nonbeing, and nothingness, expressed in existential anxiety, may be cured only by a positive religious faith.
A positive religious faith does not offer an illusion that we shall be exempt from pain and suffering, nor does it imbue us with the idea that life is a drama of unalloyed comfort and untroubled ease. Rather, it instills us with the inner equilibrium needed to face strains, burdens, and fears that inevitably come, and assures us that the universe is trustworthy and that God is concerned.
Irreligion, on the other hand, would have us believe that we are orphans cast into the terrifying immensities of space in a universe that is without purpose or intelligence. Such a view drains courage and exhausts the energies of men.
Death is not the ultimate evil; the ultimate evil is to be outside God's love. We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter. God is our eternal fallout shelter.
XV.
How can evil be cast out? Men have usually pursued two paths to eliminate evil and thereby save the world. The first calls upon man to remove evil through his own power and ingenuity in the strange conviction that by thinking, inventing, and governing, he will at last conquer the nagging forces of evil. Give people a fair chance and an education, and they will save themselves. This idea, sweeping across the modern world like a plague, has ushered God out and escorted man in and has substituted human ingenuity for divine guidance. Some people suggest that this concept was introduced during the Renaissance when reason dethroned religion, or later when Darwin's Origin of Species replaced belief in creation by the theory of evolution, or when the industrial revolution turned the hearts of men to material comforts and physical conveniences. At any rate, the idea of the adequacy of man to solve the evils of history captured the minds of people, giving rise to the easy optimism of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of inevitable progress, Rousseau's maxim of 'the original goodness of human nature,' and Condorcet's conviction that by reason alone the whole world would soon be cleansed of crime, poverty, and war.
The laboratory became man's sanctuary and scientists his priests and prophets. A modern humanist confidently affirmed:
'The future is not with the churches but with the laboratories, not with prophets but with scientists, not with piety but with efficiency.'
But in spite of these astounding new scientific developments, the old evils continue and the age of reason has been transformed into an age of terror. Selfishness and hatred have not vanished with an enlargement of our educational system and an extension of our legislative policies. A once optimistic generation now asks in utter bewilderment, 'Why could we not cast it out?'
The answer is rather simple: Man by his own power can never cast evil from the world. The humanist's hope is an illusion...
XVI.
(written as a letter from Paul to American Christians)
I find it necessary to remind you of the responsibility laid upon you to represent the ethical principles of Christianity amid a time that popularly disregards them...I understand that there are many Christians in America who give their ultimate allegiance to man-made systems and customs. They are afraid to be different. Their great concern is to be accepted socially. They live by some such principle as this: 'Everybody is doing it, so it must be all right.' For so many of you morality merely reflects group consensus...You have unconsciously come to believe that what is right is determined by Gallup polls.
American Christians, I must say to you what I wrote to the Roman Christians years ago: 'Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.' You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity. Your highest loyalty is to God, and not the mores or the folkways, the state or the nation, or any man-made institution. If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God's will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it. You must never allow the transitory, evanescent demands man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God. In a time when men are surrendering the high values of the faith you must cling to them, and despite the pressure of an alien generation preserve them for children yet unborn. You must be willing to challenge unjust mores, to champion unpopular causes, and to buck the status quo. You are called to be the salt of the earth. You are to be the light of the world. You are to be that vitally active leaven in the lump of the nation.
XVII.
In my senior year in theological seminary, I engaged in the exciting reading of various theological theories. Having been raised in a rather strict fundamentalist tradition, I was occasionally shocked when my intellectual journey carried me through new and sometimes complex doctrinal lands, but the pilgrimage was always stimulating, gave me a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis, and knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.
Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I had never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything it encompassed.
A basic change in my thinking came when I began to question some of the theories that had been associated with so-called liberal theology. Of course, there are aspects of liberalism that I hope to cherish always: its devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, and its refusal to abandon the best lights of reason.
But I began to question the liberal doctrine of man. The more I observed the tragedies of history and man's shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin. My reading of the works of Reinhold Niebuhr made me aware of the complexity of human motives and the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. Moreover, I came to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil. I realized that liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism.
I also came to see that the superficial optimism of liberalism concerning human nature overlooked the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin encourages us to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to show that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.
Due to my involvement in the struggle for the freedom of my people, I have known very few quiet days in the last few years. I have been imprisoned in Alabama and Georgia jails twelve times. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my family and I are not recipients of threats of death. I have been the victim of a near-fatal stabbing. So in a real sense I have been battered by the storms of persecution. I must admit that at times I have felt that I could no longer bear such a heavy burden, and have been tempted to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. But every time such a temptation appeared, something came to strengthen and sustain my determination. I have learned that the Master's burden is light precisely when we take his yoke upon us.
The agonizing moments through which I have passed during the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God...it is a living reality that has been validated in the experiences in everyday life. God has been profoundly real to me in recent years. In the midst of outer dangers I have felt an inner calm. In the midst of lonely days and dreary nights I have heard an inner voice saying, 'Lo, I will be with you.' When the chains of fear and the manacles of frustration have all but stymied my efforts, I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.
This undue gullibility is also seen in the tendency of many readers to accept the printed word of the press as final truth. Few people realize that even our authentic channels of information...do not give us objective and unbiased truth...Our minds are constantly being invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and false facts. One of the great needs of mankind is to be lifted above the morass of false propaganda.
This has also led to a widespread belief that there is a conflict between science and religion. But this is not true...Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
We do not need to look far to detect the dangers of softmindedness. Dictators, capitalizing on softmindedness, have led men to acts of barbarity and terror that are unthinkable in civilized society. Adolf Hitler realized that softmindedness was so prevalent among his followers that he said, 'I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.' In Mein Kampf he asserted:
'By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell, heaven...The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.'
The toughminded person always examines the facts before he reaches conclusions; in short, he postjudges. The tenderminded person reaches a conclusion before he has examined the first act; in short, he prejudices and is prejudiced.
There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of softmindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce softminded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.
II.
'Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind' -Romans 12:2
'Do not conform' is difficult advice in a generation when crowd pressures have unconsciously conditioned our minds and feet to move to the rhythmic drumbeat of the status quo. Many voices and forces urge us to choose the path of least resistance, and bid us never to fight for an unpopular cause...Even certain of our intellectual disciplines persuade us of the need to conform. Some psychologists say that mental and emotional adjustment is the reward of thinking and acting like other people.
In spite of this prevailing tendency to conform, we as Christians have a mandate to be nonconformists...we are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.
As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the very heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed.
When we would yield to the temptation of a world rife with sexual promiscuity and gone wild with a philosophy of self-expression, Jesus tells us that 'whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.'
When we refuse to suffer for righteousness and choose to follow the path of comfort rather than conviction, we hear Jesus say, 'Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.'
When in our spiritual pride we boast of having reached the peak of moral excellence, Jesus warns, 'The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you.'
Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody. Along with this has grown an inordinate worship of bigness...where men find security in that which is large and extensive - big cities, big buildings, big corporations.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.' To the conformist and the shapers of the conformist mentality, this must surely sound like a most dangerous and radical doctrine. Have we permitted the lamp of independent thought and individualism to become so dim that were Jefferson to write and live by these words today we would find cause to harass and investigate him? If Americans permit thought-control, business-control and freedom-control to continue, we shall surely move within the shadows of fascism.
We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitatively small, they were qualitative giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ...If the church of Jesus Christ is to regain once more its power, message, and authentic ring, it must conform only to the demands of the gospel.
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists. In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!
III.
We so often ask, 'What will happen to my job, my prestige, or my status if I take a stand on this issue? Will my home be bombed, will my life be threatened, or will I be jailed?' The good man always reverses the question...'What will happen to these millions of people who have been wounded by the forces of injustice, if I do not go to them?'
The Samaritan also possessed excessive altruism. With his own hands he bound the wounds of the man and then sent him on his own beast. It would have been easier to pay an ambulance to take the unfortunate man to the hospital, rather than risk having his neatly trimmed suit stained with blood. True altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to sympathize. Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul...Instead of seeking to do something with the African and Asian peoples, we have too often sought only to do something for them. An expression of pity, devoid of genuine sympathy, leads to a new form of paternalism which no self-respecting person can accept.
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick has made an impressive distinction between enforceable and unenforceable obligations. The former are regulated by the codes of society and the vigorous implementation of law-enforcement agencies..But unenforceable obligations are beyond the reach of the laws of society. They concern inner attitudes, genuine person-to-person relations, and expressions of compassion which law books cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify. Such obligations are met by one's commitment to an inner law, written on the heart. No code of conduct ever persuaded a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife...A good father is obedient to the unenforceable.
We must admit that the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable...Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right.
No longer can we afford the luxury of passing by on the other side. Such folly was once called moral failure; today it will lead to universal suicide. We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together.
V.
Lincoln tried love and left for all history a magnificent drama of reconciliation. When he was campaigning for the presidency, one of his arch-enemies was a man named Stanton. For some reason Stanton hated Lincoln. He used every ounce of his energy to degrade him in the eyes of the public. So deep rooted was Stanton’s hate for Lincoln that he uttered words about his physical appearance, and sought to embarrass him at every point with bitterest diatribes. But in spite of this Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Then came the period when he had to select his cabinet which would consist of the persons who would be his most intimate associates in implementing his program. He started choosing men here and there for the various secretaryships. The day finally came for Lincoln to select a man to fill the all-important post of Secretary of War. Can you imagine who Lincoln chose to fill this post? None other than the man named Stanton. There was an immediate uproar in the inner circle where the news began to spread. Adviser after adviser was heard saying, “Mr. President, you are making a mistake. Do you know this man, Stanton? Are you familiar with all of the ugly things he said about you? He is your enemy. He will seek to sabotage your program. Have you thought this through, Mr. President?” Mr. Lincoln’s answer was terse and to the point: “Yes. I know Mr. Stanton. I am aware of all the terrible things he has said about me. But after looking over the nation, I find he is the best man for the job”. So, Stanton became Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War and rendered an invaluable service to his nation and his President. Not many years later Lincoln was assassinated. Many laudable things were said about him. Even today millions of people still adore him as the greatest of Americans. But of all the great statements made about Abraham Lincoln, the words of Stanton remain among the greatest. Standing near the dead body of the man he once hated, Stanton referred to him as one of the greatest men that had ever lived and said, “He now belongs to the ages”. If Lincoln had hated Stanton both the men would have gone to their graves as bitter enemies. But through the power of love Lincoln transformed an enemy into a friend. It was the same attitude that made it possible for Lincoln to speak a kind word about the South during the Civil War when feeling was the bitterest. Asked by a shocked bystander how he could do this, Lincoln answered, “Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” This is the power of redemptive love.
My friends, we have followed the so-called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos...For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way. This does not mean we must abandon our righteous efforts. With every ounce of our energy we must continue to rid this nation of the incubus of segregation. But we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege and our obligation to love. While abhorring segregation, we shall love the segregationist. This is the only way to create the beloved community.
To our most bitter opponents we say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force...Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer.
Napoleon Bonaparte, the great military genius, looking back over his years of conquest, is reported to have said: 'Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and I have built great empires. But upon what did they depend? They depended on force. But centuries ago Jesus started an empire that was built on love,and even to this day millions will die for him.' Who can doubt the veracity of these words. The great military leaders of the past have gone, and their empires have crumbles and burned to ashes. But the empire of Jesus, built solidly and majestically on the foundation of love, is still growing.
Jesus is eternally right. History is replete with the bleached bones of nations that refused to listen to him. May we in the twentieth century hear and follow his words - before it is too late.
VI.
How naturally we turn to science in a day when the problems of the world are so ghastly and ominous. But alas! Science cannot rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide.
The midnight in man's external collective life is paralleled by midnight in his internal individual life. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Deep clouds of anxiety and depression are suspended in our mental skies. More people are emotionally disturbed today than at any other time of human history...Some have been tempted to revise Jesus' command to read, 'Go ye into all the world, keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality.'
It is also midnight within the moral order. At midnight colors lose their distinctiveness and become a sullen shade of gray. Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and absolute wrong is a matter of what the majority is doing. Right and wrong are relative to the likes and dislikes and the customs of a particular community. We have unconsciously applied Einstein's theory of relativity, which properly described the physical universe, to the moral and ethical realm.
Midnight is the hour when men desperately seek to obey the eleventh commandment: 'Thou shalt not get caught.' According to the ethic of midnight, the cardinal sin is to be caught and the cardinal virtue is to get by. It is all right to lie, but one must lie with real finesse. It is all right to steal, if one is so dignified that, if caught, the charge becomes embezzlement, not robbery. It is permissible even to hate, if one dresses his hating in the garments of love and hating appears to be loving. The Darwinian concept the of survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest. This mentality has brought a tragic breakdown of moral standards, and the midnight of moral degeneration deepens.
As in the parable, so in our world today, the deep darkness of midnight is interrupted by the sound of a knock. On the door of the church millions of people knock. In this country the roll of church members is larger than ever before...Visitors to Soviet Russia, whose official policy is atheistic, report that the churches in that nation are not only crowded, but that attendance continues to grow. Harrison Salisbury, in an article in the New York Times, states that Communist officials are disturbed that so many young people express a growing interest in the church and religion. After forty years of the most vigorous efforts to suppress religion, the hierarchy of the Communist party now faces the inescapable fact that millions of people are knocking on the door of the church.
There is also a deep longing for the bread of hope. In the early years of the century many people did not hunger for this bread. The days of the first telephones, automobiles, and airplanes gave them a radiant optimism. They worshiped on the shrine of inevitable progress...But then a series of tragic developments, revealing the selfishness and corruption of man, illustrated with frightening clarity the truth of Lord Acton's dictum, 'Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' This awful discovery led to one of the most colossal breakdowns of optimism in history. For so many people, young and old, the light of hope went out, and they roamed wearily in the dark chambers of pessimism. Many concluded that life has no meaning...But even in the inevitable moments when all seems hopeless, men know that without hope they cannot really live, and in agonizing desperation they cry for the bread of hope.
The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.
Two types of Negro churches have failed to provide bread. One burns with emotionalism, the other freezes with classism. The former, reducing worship to entertainment, places more emphasis on volume than on content and confuses spirituality with muscularity. The danger in such a church is that the members may have more religion in their hands and feet than in their hearts and souls.
VII.
Jesus never made a sweeping indictment against wealth. Rather, he condemned the misuse of wealth. Money, like any other force such as electricity, is amoral and can be used for either good or evil...Nothing in wealth is inherently vicious, and nothing in poverty is inherently virtuous.
The rich man was a fool because he permitted the ends for which he lived to become confused with the means by which he lived. The economic structure of his life absorbed his destiny...His life was submerged in the rolling waters of livelihood.
The richer this man became materially the poorer he became intellectually and spiritually. He may have been married, but he probably could not love his wife. It is possible that he gave her countless material gifts, but he could not give her that which she needed most, love and affection.
His soliloquy contains approximately sixty words, yet 'I' and 'my' occur twelve times. He had said 'I' and 'my' so often that he had lost the capacity to say 'we' and 'our.' A victim of the cancerous disease of egotism, he failed to realize that wealth always comes as a result of the commonwealth. He talked as though he could plow the fields and build the barns alone. He failed to realize that he was an heir of the vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead had contributed.
Jesus called the rich man a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on God. He talked as though he unfolded the seasons and provided the fertility of the soil, controlled the rising and the setting of the sun, and regulated the natural processes that produce the rain and the dew. He had an unconscious feeling that he was the Creator, not a creature.
This man-centered foolishness has had a long and ofttimes disastrous reign in the history of mankind. Sometimes it is theoretically expressed in the doctrine of materialism, which contends...that man is a transient accident of protons and electrons traveling blind, and thought is a temporary product of gray matter, and that the events of history are an interaction of matter and motion operating by the principle of necessity. Having no place for God or for external ideas, materialism is opposed to both theism and idealism.
This materialistic philosophy leads inevitably into a dead-end street in an intellectually senseless world. To believe that human personality is the result of the fortuitous interplay of atoms and electrons is as absurd as to believe that a monkey by hitting typewriter keys at random will eventually produce a Shakespearean play. Sheer magic! It is much more sensible to say with Sir James Jeans, the physicist, that 'the universe seems to be nearer to a great thought than to a great machine,' or with Arthur Balfour, the philosopher, that 'we now know too much about matter to be materialists.' Materialism is a weak flame that is blown out by the breath of mature thinking.
Another attempt to make God irrelevant is found in nontheistic humanism, a philosophy that deifies man by affirming that humanity is God. Man is the measure of all things. Many modern men who have embraced this philosophy contend, as did Rousseau, that human nature is essentially good. Evil is to be found only in institutions, and if poverty and ignorance were to be removed everything would be all right. The twentieth century opened with such a glowing optimism. Men believed that civilization was evolving toward an earthly paradise. Herbert Spencer skillfully molded the Darwinian theory of evolution into the steady idea of automatic progress. Men became convinced that there is a sociological law of progress which is as valid as the physical law of gravitation.
Then came the explosion of this myth. It climaxed in the horrors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and in the fierce fury of fifty-megaton bombs. Now we have come to see that science can give us only physical power, which, if not controlled by spiritual power, will lead inevitably to cosmic doom. The words of Alfred the Great are still true: 'Power is never good unless he be good that has it.' We need something more spiritually sustaining and morally controlling than science...apart from Gods' spirit, science is a deadly weapon that will lead only to deeper chaos.
Why fool ourselves about automatic progress and the ability of man to save himself? We must lift up our minds and eyes unto the hills from whence cometh our true help. Then, and only then, will the advances of modern science be a blessing rather than a curse.
The means by which we live has outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world of externals - airplanes, electric lights, automobiles, and color television - and lose the internal - his own soul?
VIII.
Is anything more obvious than the presence of evil in the universe? Its nagging, prehensile tentacles project into every level of human existence. We may debate the origin of evil, but only a victim of superficial optimism would debate its reality. Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.
But there is a checkpoint in the universe: evil cannot permanently organize itself.
We must be careful at this point not to engage in a superficial optimism or to conclude that the death of a particular evil means that all evil lies dead upon the seashore. All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. The Kingdom of God as a universal reality is not yet. Because sin exists on every level of man's existence, the death of one tyranny is followed by the emergence of another tyranny.
But just as we must avoid a superficial optimism, we must also avoid a crippling pessimism. Even though all progress is precarious, within limits real social progress may be made...Above all, we must be reminded anew that God is at work in his universe. He is not outside the world looking on with a sort of cold indifference. Here on all the roads of life, he is striving in our striving. Like an ever-loving Father, he is working through history for the salvation of his children. As we struggle to defeat the forces of evil, the God of the universe struggles with us. Evil dies on the seashore, not merely because of man's endless struggle against it, but because of God's power to defeat it.
I do not pretend to understand all of the ways of God or his particular timetable for grappling with evil. Perhaps if God dealt with evil in the overbearing way that we wish, he would defeat his ultimate purpose. We are responsible human beings, not blind automatons; persons, not puppets. By endowing us with freedom, God relinquished a measure of his own sovereignty and imposed certain limitations upon himself. If his children are free, they must do his will by voluntary choice. Therefore, God cannot at the same time impose his will upon his children and also maintain his purpose for man. If through sheer omnipotence God were to defeat his purpose, he would express weakness rather than power. Power is the ability to fulfill purpose; action which defeats purpose is weakness.
This faith will sustain us in our struggle to escape from the bondage of every evil Egypt. This faith will be a lamp unto our weary feet and a light unto our meandering path. Without such faith, man's highest dreams will pass silently to the dust.
IX.
Any complete life has the three dimensions suggested in our text - length, breadth, and height. The length of life is the inward drive to achieve one's personal ends and ambitions, an inward concern for one's own welfare and achievements. The breadth of life is the outward concern for the welfare of others. The height of life is the upward reach for God...Without the due development of each part of the triangle, no life can be complete.
We are challenged on every hand to work untiringly to achieve excellence in our lifework. Not all men are called to specialized or professional jobs; even fewer rise to the heights of genius in the arts and sciences; many are called to be laborers in factories, fields, and streets. But no work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.' This is what Douglas Mallock meant when he wrote:
If you can't be a pine on the top of the hill
Be a scrub in the valley - but be
The best little scrub by the side of the rill,
Be a bush, if you can't be a tree.
If you can't be a highway, just be a trail
If you can't be the sun, be a star;
It isn't by size, that you win or fail-
Be the best of whatever you are.
Set yourself earnestly to discover what you are made to do, and then give yourself passionately to the doing of it. This clear outward drive toward self-fulfillment is the length of a man's life.
One will not be asked how many academic degrees he obtained or how much money he acquired, but how much he did for others.
...
I suspect, however, that a majority of people fit into still another category. They do not deny the existence of God with their lips, but they are continually denying his existence with their lives. They live as though there is no God. This erasing of God from the agenda of life may well have been an unconscious process. Most men do not say, 'Good-by, God, I am going to leave you now.' But they become so involved in the things of this world that they are unconsciously carried away by the rushing tide of materialism and are left treading in the confused waters of secularism. Modern man, living in what Professor Sorokin has called a 'sensate culture,' believes only those things which can be known by the five senses.
But this attempt to substitute a man-centered universe for a God-centered universe leads only to deeper frustration. Reinhold Niebuhr has said, 'Since 1914 one tragic event has followed another as if history were designed to refute the vain delusions of modern man.' We sail upon the seas of modern history like a ship without a compass.
I would urge you to give priority to the search for God. Allow his spirit to permeate your being. To meet the difficulties and challenges of your life you will need him...Without God, all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights. Without him, life is a meaningless drama in which the decisive scenes are missing. But with him, we are able to rise from tension-packed valleys to the sublime heights of inner peace, and find radiant stars of hope against the nocturnal bosom of life's most depressing nights. St. Augustine was right: 'Thou hast created us for thyself, and our heart cannot be quieted till it find repose in thee.'
I suspect that all too many of us are still dabbling with plans that are big in quantity, but small in quality, plans that move on the horizontal plane of time rather than on the vertical plane of eternity. I, too, would urge you to make your plans so large and broad that they cannot be bound by the chains of time and the manacles of space. Give your life - all you have and are - to the God of the universe whose purpose changeth not.
Where do we find this God? In a test tube? No. Where else except in Jesus Christ, the Lord of our lives? By knowing him we know God...If we are to know what God is like and understand his purposes for mankind, we must turn to Christ. By committing ourselves absolutely to Christ and his way, we will participate in that marvelous act of faith that will bring us to the true knowledge of God.
X.
One possible reaction is to distill all our frustrations into a core of bitterness and resentment. The person who pursues this path is likely to develop a callous attitude, a cold heart, and a bitter hatred toward God, toward those with whom he lives, and toward himself. Because he cannot corner God or life, he releases his pent-up vindictiveness in hostility toward other people. He may be extremely cruel to his mate and inhuman to his children. In short, meanness becomes his dominating characteristic. He loves no one and requires love from no one. He trusts no one and does not expect others to trust him. He finds fault in everything and everybody, and he continually complains.
We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but...Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities.
Our capacity to deal creatively with shattered dreams is ultimately determined by our faith in God. Genuine faith imbues us with the conviction that beyond time is a divine Spirit and beyond life is Life. However dismal and catastrophic may be the present circumstance, we know we are not alone, for God dwells with us in life's most confining and oppressive cells.
XI.
What Is Man?
The whole political, social, and economic structure of a society is largely determined by its answer to this vital question. Indeed, the conflict we witness between totalitarianism and democracy is fundamentally centered in this: Is man a person or a pawn? Is he a cog in the wheel of the state or a free, creative being capable of accepting responsibility?
Those who think of man purely in materialistic terms argue that man is simply an animal, a tiny object in the vast, ever-changing organism called nature, which is wholly unconscious and impersonal. His whole life may be explained in terms of matter in motion. Such a system of thought affirms that the conduct of man is physically determined and that the mind is merely an effect of the brain.
Those who posit the materialistic conception of man are often driven to the dark chambers of pessimism. They often find themselves agreeing with a recent writer that 'man is a cosmic accident, a disease on this planet not soon to be cured,' or with Jonathan Swift, who wrote, 'Man is the most pernicious little race of ominous vermin that nature ever suffered to walk across the face of the earth.'
Some thinkers never get beyond the point of seeing man as an animal. The Marxists, for instance, following a theory of dialectical materialism, contend that man is merely a producing animal who supplies his own needs and whose life is determined largely by economic forces. Others contend that the whole life of man is nothing but a materialistic process with a materialistic meaning.
Can man be explained in such shallow terms? Can we explain the literary genius of Shakespeare, the musical genius of Beethoven, and the artistic genius of Michelangelo in materialistic terms? Can we explain the spiritual genius of Jesus of Nazareth in materialistic terms? Can we explain the mystery and the magic of the human soul in materialistic terms? Oh, no! There is something within man which cannot be explained in chemical and biological terms, for man is more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons.
This brings us to a second point that must be included in any Christian doctrine of man. Man is a being of spirit. He moves us 'the stairs of his concepts' into a wonder world of thought. Conscience speaks to him, and he is reminded of things divine.
This spiritual quality gives him the unique capacity to live on two levels. He is in nature, yet above nature; he is in space and time, yet above them. He can do creative things that lower animals could never do. Man can think a poem and write it; he can think a symphony and compose it; he can think of a great civilization and produce it. Because of this capacity, he is not bound completely by space and time...By his ability to reason, his power of memory, and his gift of imagination, man transcends time and space. As marvelous as are the stars is the mind of man that studies them.
This is what the Bible means when it affirms that man is made in the image of God...An abiding expression of man's higher spiritual nature is his freedom. Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free too deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.
We hate to be told that man is a sinner. Nothing so insults modern man's pride. We have tried desperately to find other words - error of nature, absence of good, false concept of mind - to explain the sin of man. Turning to depth psychology, we attempt to dismiss sin as the result of inner conflicts, inhibitions, or a battle between the 'id' and the 'super-ego.' These concepts only serve to remind us that engulfing human nature is a tragic, threefold estrangement by which man is separated from himself, his neighbors, and his God. There is a corruption in man's will.
Man's sinfulness sinks to such devastating depths in his collective life that Reinhold Niebuhr could write a book titled Moral Man and Immoral Society. Man collectivized in the group, the tribe, the race, and the nation often sinks to levels of barbarity unthinkable even among lower animals.
Man is a sinner in need of God's forgiving grace. This is not deadening pessimism; it is Christian realism.
Despite man's tendency to live on low and degrading planes, something reminds him that he is not made for that. As he trails in the dust, something reminds him that he is made for the stars. As he makes folly his bedfellow, a nagging inner voice tells him that he is born for eternity. God's unbroken hold on us is something that will never permit us to feel right when we do wrong or to feel natural when we do the unnatural.
Jesus told of a young man who left home and wandered into a far country, where in adventure after adventure and sensation after sensation, he sought life. But he never found it; he found only frustration and bewilderment. The farther he moved from his father's house, the closer he came to the house of despair. The more he did what he liked, the less he liked what he did. Instead of leading him to a land flowing with the milk of happiness, the prodigal's journey led him to a pig's trough. This parable is an eternal reminder of the fact that man is made for the Father's house and that every excursion into the far country brings only frustration and homesickness.
Thank God the parable tells us more. The prodigal son was not himself when he left his father's house or when he dreamed that pleasure was the end of life. Only when he made up his mind to go home and be a son again did he really come to himself. There he found a loving father waiting with outstretched arms and a heart filled with unutterable joy. When the soul returns to its true home, there is always joy.
XII.
How Should A Christian View Communism?
Let me state clearly the basic premise of this sermon: Communism and Christianity are fundamentally incompatible. A true Christian cannot be a true Communist, for the two philosophies are antithetical and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot reconcile them.
First, Communism is based on a materialistic and humanistic view of life and history. According to Communist theory, matter, not mind or spirit, speaks the last word in the universe. Such a philosophy is avowedly secularistic and atheistic. Under it, God is merely a figment of the imagination, religion is the product of fear and ignorance, and the church is an invention of the rulers to control the masses. Moreover, Communism, like humanism, thrives on the grand illusion that man, unaided by any divine power, can save himself and usher in a new society-
I fight alone, and win or sink,
I need no one to make me free;
I want no Jesus Christ to think,
That He would ever die for me.
Cold atheism wrapped in the garments of materialism, Communism provides no place for God or Christ.
At the center of the Christian faith is the affirmation that there is a God in the universe who is the ground and essence of all reality. A Being of infinite love and boundless power, God is the creator, sustainer, and conserver of values. In opposition to Communism's atheistic materialism, Christianity posits a theistic idealism. Reality cannot be explained by matter in motion or the push and pull of economic forces. Christianity affirms that at the heart of reality is a Heart, a loving Father who works through history for the salvation of his children. Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior.
Second, Communism is based on ethical relativism and accepts no stable moral absolutes. Right and wrong are relative to the most expedient methods for dealing with class war. Communism exploits the dreadful philosophy that the end justifies the means. It enunciates movingly the theory of a classless society, but alas! its methods for achieving this noble end are all too often ignoble. Lying, violence, murder, and torture are considered to be justifiable means to achieve the millennial end. Is this an unfair indictment? Listen to the words of Lenin, the real tactician of Communist theory: "We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth." Modem history has known many tortuous nights and horror-filled days because his followers have taken this statement seriously.
In contrast to the ethical relativism of Communism, Christianity sets forth a system of absolute moral values and affirms that God has placed within the very structure of this universe certain moral principles that are fixed and immutable. The law of love as an imperative is the norm for all of man's actions. Furthermore, Christianity at its best refuses to live by a philosophy of ends justifying means. Destructive means cannot bring constructive ends, because the means represent the-ideal-in-the-making and the-end-in-progress. Immoral means cannot bring moral ends, for the ends are preexistent in the means.
Third, Communism attributes ultimate value to the state. Man is made for the state and not the state for man. One may object, saying that in Communist theory the state is an "interim reality," which will "wither away" when the classless society emerges. True--in theory; but it is also true that, while it lasts, the state is the end. Man is a means to that end. Man has no inalienable rights. His only rights are derived from, and conferred by, the state. Under such a system, the fountain of freedom runs dry. Restricted are man's liberties of press and assembly, his freedom to vote, and his freedom to listen and to read. Art, religion, education, music, and science come under the gripping yoke of government control. Man must be a dutiful servant to the omnipotent state.
All of this is contrary, not only to the Christian doctrine of God, but also to the Christian estimate of man. Christianity insists that man is an end because he is a child of God, made in God's image. Man is more than a producing animal guided by economic forces; he is a being of spirit, crowned with glory and honor, endowed with the gift of freedom. The ultimate weakness of Communism is that it robs man of that quality which makes him man. Man, says Paul Tillich, is man because he is free. This freedom is expressed through man's capacity to deliberate, decide, and respond. Under Communism, the individual soul is shackled by the chains of conformity; his spirit is bound by the manacles of party allegiance. He is stripped of both conscience and reason. The trouble with Communism is that it has neither a theology nor a Christology; therefore it emerges with a mixed-up anthropology. Confused about God, it is also confused about man. In spite of its glowing talk about the welfare of the masses, Communism's methods and philosophy strip man of his dignity and worth, leaving him as little more than a depersonalized cog in the ever-turning wheel of the state.
Clearly, then, all of this is out of harmony with the Christian view of things. We must not fool ourselves. These systems of thought are too contradictory to be reconciled; they represent diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world and of transforming it. We should as Christians pray for the Communist constantly, but never can we, as true Christians, tolerate the philosophy of Communism.
The Communist Manifesto was written by men aflame with a passion for social justice.
Communism in theory emphasizes a classless society. Although the world knows from sad experience that Communism has created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice...
No doctrinaire Communist ever expressed a passion for the poor and oppressed such as we find in the Manifesto of Jesus which affirms: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord."
Christians are also bound to recognize the ideal of a world unity in which all barriers of caste and color are abolished. Christianity repudiates racism. The broad universalism standing at the center of the gospel makes both the theory and practice of racial injustice morally unjustifiable. Racial prejudice is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ, for in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, Negro nor white.
We need to pledge ourselves anew to the cause of Christ. We must recapture the spirit of the early church. Wherever the early Christians went, they made a triumphant witness for Christ. Whether on the village streets or in the city jails, they daringly proclaimed the good news of the gospel. Their reward for this audacious witness was often the excruciating agony of a lion's den or the poignant pain of a chopping block, but they continued in the faith that they had discovered a cause so great and had been transformed by a Savior so divine that even death was not too great a sacrifice. When they entered a town, the power structure became disturbed. Their new gospel brought the refreshing warmth of spring to men whose lives had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. They urged men to revolt against old systems of injustice and old structures of immorality. When the rulers objected, these strange people, intoxicated with the wine of God's grace, continued to proclaim the gospel until even men and women in Caesar's household were convinced, until jailers dropped their keys, and until kings trembled on their thrones. T. R. Glover has written that the early Christians "out-thought, out-lived, and out-died" everyone else.
Where is that kind of fervor today? Where is that kind of daring, revolutionary commitment to Christ today?
Christ must once more be enthroned in our lives. This is our best defense against Communism.
We must not engage in a negative anti-Communism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against Communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice and righteousness...Like the early Christians, we must move into a sometimes hostile world armed with the revolutionary gospel of Jesus Christ. With this powerful gospel we shall boldly challenge the status quos and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed."
Our hard challenge and our sublime opportunity is to bear witness to the spirit of Christ in fashioning a truly Christian world. If we accept the challenge with devotion and valor, the bell of history will toll for Communism. and we shall make the world safe for democracy and secure for the people of Christ.
XIII.
Let us notice also that God is able to subdue all the powers of evil. In affirming that God is able to conquer evil we admit the reality of evil. Christianity has never dismissed evil as illusory, or an error of the mortal mind. It reckons with evil as a force that has objective reality. But Christianity contends that evil contains the seed of its own destruction. History is the story of evil forces that advance with seemingly irresistible power only to be crushed by the battling rams of the forces of justice. There is a law in the moral world - which reminds us that life will work only in a certain way. The Hitlers and the Mussolinis have their day, and for a period they may wield great power...but soon they are cut down like the grass and whither as the green herb.
God walks with us. He has placed within the very structure of this universe certain absolute moral laws. We can neither defy nor break them. If we disobey them, they will break us.
At times we may feel that we do not need God, but on the day when the storms of disappointment rage, the winds of disaster blow, and the tidal waves of grief beat against our lives, if we do not have a deep and patient faith our emotional lives will be ripped to shreds. There is so much frustration in the world because we have relied on gods rather than God. We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate. We have worshiped the god of pleasure only to discover that thrills play out and sensations are short-lived.
The transitory gods are not able to save us or bring happiness to the human heart. Only God is able.
XIV.
Everywhere men are confronted by fears that often appear in strange disguises or a variety of wardrobes. Haunted by the possibility of bad health, we detect in every meaningless symptom an evidence of disease...A fear of what life may bring encourages some persons to wander aimlessly along the frittering road of excessive drink and sexual promiscuity. Almost without being aware of the change, many people have permitted fear to transform the sunrise of love and peace into a sunset of inner depression.
But I do not mean to suggest that we should seek to eliminate fear altogether from human life. Were this humanly possible, it would be practically undesirable. Fear is the elemental alarm system of the human organism which warns us of approaching dangers and without which man could not have survived in either the primitive or modern worlds. Fear, moreover, is a powerfully creative force. Every great invention and intellectual advance represents a desire to escape from some dreaded circumstance or condition. The fear of darkness led to the discovery of the secret of electricity. The fear of pain left to the marvelous advances of human science. The fear of ignorance was one reason that man built great institutions in learning...Angelo Patri has rightly said, 'Education consists in being afraid at the right time.' If man were to lose his capacity to fear, he would be deprived of his capacity to grow, invent, and create. So in a sense fear is normal, necessary, and creative.
But this is only a part of the story. Normal fear protects us; abnormal fear paralyzes us. Normal fear motivates us to improve our individual and collective welfare; abnormal fear constantly poisons and distorts our inner lives. Our problem is not to be rid of fear but rather to harness and master it.
Courage, the determination not to be overwhelmed by any object, however frightful, enables us to stand up to any fear...Evil and pain in this conundrum of life are close to each of us, and we do both ourselves and our neighbors a great disservice when we attempt to prove that there is nothing in this world of which we should be frightened.
Courage and cowardice are antithetical. Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations; cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance. Courage breeds creative self-affirmation; cowardice produces self-abnegation. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.
The Negro must convince the white man that he seeks justice for both himself and the white man. A mass movement exercising love and nonviolence and demonstrating power under discipline should convince the white community that were such a movement to attain strength its power would be used creatively and not vengefully.
Abnormal fears and phobias that are expressed in neurotic anxiety may be cured by psychiatry; but the fear of death, nonbeing, and nothingness, expressed in existential anxiety, may be cured only by a positive religious faith.
A positive religious faith does not offer an illusion that we shall be exempt from pain and suffering, nor does it imbue us with the idea that life is a drama of unalloyed comfort and untroubled ease. Rather, it instills us with the inner equilibrium needed to face strains, burdens, and fears that inevitably come, and assures us that the universe is trustworthy and that God is concerned.
Irreligion, on the other hand, would have us believe that we are orphans cast into the terrifying immensities of space in a universe that is without purpose or intelligence. Such a view drains courage and exhausts the energies of men.
Death is not the ultimate evil; the ultimate evil is to be outside God's love. We need not join the mad rush to purchase an earthly fallout shelter. God is our eternal fallout shelter.
XV.
How can evil be cast out? Men have usually pursued two paths to eliminate evil and thereby save the world. The first calls upon man to remove evil through his own power and ingenuity in the strange conviction that by thinking, inventing, and governing, he will at last conquer the nagging forces of evil. Give people a fair chance and an education, and they will save themselves. This idea, sweeping across the modern world like a plague, has ushered God out and escorted man in and has substituted human ingenuity for divine guidance. Some people suggest that this concept was introduced during the Renaissance when reason dethroned religion, or later when Darwin's Origin of Species replaced belief in creation by the theory of evolution, or when the industrial revolution turned the hearts of men to material comforts and physical conveniences. At any rate, the idea of the adequacy of man to solve the evils of history captured the minds of people, giving rise to the easy optimism of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of inevitable progress, Rousseau's maxim of 'the original goodness of human nature,' and Condorcet's conviction that by reason alone the whole world would soon be cleansed of crime, poverty, and war.
The laboratory became man's sanctuary and scientists his priests and prophets. A modern humanist confidently affirmed:
'The future is not with the churches but with the laboratories, not with prophets but with scientists, not with piety but with efficiency.'
But in spite of these astounding new scientific developments, the old evils continue and the age of reason has been transformed into an age of terror. Selfishness and hatred have not vanished with an enlargement of our educational system and an extension of our legislative policies. A once optimistic generation now asks in utter bewilderment, 'Why could we not cast it out?'
The answer is rather simple: Man by his own power can never cast evil from the world. The humanist's hope is an illusion...
XVI.
(written as a letter from Paul to American Christians)
I find it necessary to remind you of the responsibility laid upon you to represent the ethical principles of Christianity amid a time that popularly disregards them...I understand that there are many Christians in America who give their ultimate allegiance to man-made systems and customs. They are afraid to be different. Their great concern is to be accepted socially. They live by some such principle as this: 'Everybody is doing it, so it must be all right.' For so many of you morality merely reflects group consensus...You have unconsciously come to believe that what is right is determined by Gallup polls.
American Christians, I must say to you what I wrote to the Roman Christians years ago: 'Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.' You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity. Your highest loyalty is to God, and not the mores or the folkways, the state or the nation, or any man-made institution. If any earthly institution or custom conflicts with God's will, it is your Christian duty to oppose it. You must never allow the transitory, evanescent demands man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God. In a time when men are surrendering the high values of the faith you must cling to them, and despite the pressure of an alien generation preserve them for children yet unborn. You must be willing to challenge unjust mores, to champion unpopular causes, and to buck the status quo. You are called to be the salt of the earth. You are to be the light of the world. You are to be that vitally active leaven in the lump of the nation.
XVII.
In my senior year in theological seminary, I engaged in the exciting reading of various theological theories. Having been raised in a rather strict fundamentalist tradition, I was occasionally shocked when my intellectual journey carried me through new and sometimes complex doctrinal lands, but the pilgrimage was always stimulating, gave me a new appreciation for objective appraisal and critical analysis, and knocked me out of my dogmatic slumber.
Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that I had never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting uncritically everything it encompassed.
A basic change in my thinking came when I began to question some of the theories that had been associated with so-called liberal theology. Of course, there are aspects of liberalism that I hope to cherish always: its devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, and its refusal to abandon the best lights of reason.
But I began to question the liberal doctrine of man. The more I observed the tragedies of history and man's shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of sin. My reading of the works of Reinhold Niebuhr made me aware of the complexity of human motives and the reality of sin on every level of man's existence. Moreover, I came to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil. I realized that liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism.
I also came to see that the superficial optimism of liberalism concerning human nature overlooked the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin encourages us to rationalize our actions. Liberalism failed to show that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man's defensive ways of thinking. Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.
Due to my involvement in the struggle for the freedom of my people, I have known very few quiet days in the last few years. I have been imprisoned in Alabama and Georgia jails twelve times. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my family and I are not recipients of threats of death. I have been the victim of a near-fatal stabbing. So in a real sense I have been battered by the storms of persecution. I must admit that at times I have felt that I could no longer bear such a heavy burden, and have been tempted to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. But every time such a temptation appeared, something came to strengthen and sustain my determination. I have learned that the Master's burden is light precisely when we take his yoke upon us.
The agonizing moments through which I have passed during the last few years have also drawn me closer to God. More than ever before I am convinced of the reality of a personal God...it is a living reality that has been validated in the experiences in everyday life. God has been profoundly real to me in recent years. In the midst of outer dangers I have felt an inner calm. In the midst of lonely days and dreary nights I have heard an inner voice saying, 'Lo, I will be with you.' When the chains of fear and the manacles of frustration have all but stymied my efforts, I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope. I am convinced that the universe is under the control of a loving purpose, and that in the struggle for righteousness man has cosmic companionship.
Spinning round and round like the deadly hands of a radium clock. 
